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Execution botched despite lethal-injection warnings

By Michael Reilly

Clayton Lockett’s execution went badly wrong

(Image: AP Photo/Oklahoma Department of Corrections)

A death penalty execution in Oklahoma has gone horribly wrong. And it has happened despite warnings that as states tinker with the drugs used in lethal injections, they are in uncharted territory and risk violating the US Constitution’s provision against “cruel and unusual punishment”.

Yesterday, two inmates, Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, were scheduled to be killed using an untested drug cocktail. This included the sedative midazolam, which was first used in an execution in January, where an inmate reportedly gasped for air for more than 10 minutes after it was administered. Shortly after the state gave Lockett the drug, in what should have been a lethal dose, it was clear something was not right.

Lockett raised his head and spoke several minutes after he should have been unconscious, according to a local news report. After the other drugs, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride, were administered, a prison official reported that his vein had ruptured and they were not properly delivered. The execution was stopped, and Lockett died of a heart attack a few minutes later.

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The episode, which prompted Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin to order an investigation and postpone Warner’s execution, is the latest in a series of fresh concerns over how death sentences are meted out in the US.

As we reported yesterday, a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that more than 300 inmates now on death row may be innocent. And in a study due to be published in the Georgetown Law Journal next month, Deborah Denno of Fordham University in New York shows that over the last six years, states have modified their drug protocols for lethal injection more than 300 times. That is in response to long-running shortages caused by European manufacturers refusing to sell lethal injection drugs to prisons.

In her study, Denno concluded that these changes are often implemented haphazardly, and without sufficient oversight. “Lethal injection is worse than it ever has been,” she told New Scientist.